Til Morning Comes
by Animegirl1129
Summary: In which Fred has had a long day and all he wants to do is sleep. Fred/Shaggy Pre-Slash. Mystery Begins!Verse.


Til Morning Comes

_**Written in response to cottoncandy_bingo prompts: roommates and cuddling. Set in Mystery Begins!Verse. This is a little less serious than my usual fics and isn't quite as plotty, either. Just a quick little fic. Characters not mine, please enjoy! Comments are awesome.**_

* * *

Fred stares at the room before him in exhausted confusion after way too much time spent behind the wheel of the Mystery Machine en route to Shaggy's Uncle Nat's place. He'd been promised a bed upon arrival, and there is indeed a bed. But there's only one bed and there's two of them - well, two of them and Scooby Doo, that is, really - and the math isn't adding up in his head. He's vaguely aware that there'd only been one bed in the nearly identical room they'd left the girls in just down the hall, but for some reason this is a seriously perplexing situation and he does not presently have the level of consciousness required to deal with it.

"Huh," Shaggy says, worming his way past Fred to drop his bag on the end of one side of the bed. "It looks like we're sharing."

"Yeah," he answers, voice slow and sleepy. He wonders how, in a building that is more mansion than house, there can be so many unusable rooms - and why those that are open can't have more than one bed in them. "Guess so."

"Is... is that okay?"

A nod, because he is far too tired to argue and it's already a ridiculous hour of late. He stumbles into the room and drops his own bag on the floor, and immediately sprawls across his half of the sizable bed. "S'fine, Shags."

Shaggy takes his time, though. Not that Fred notices. He drifts off nearly instantaneously while Shaggy changes and brushes his teeth and disappears with Scooby for a quick midnight snack. He's jarred back to a low level of awareness when Shaggy climbs into bed next to him, though the other boy is obviously trying to disturb him as little as possible.

"Sorry," he whispers, pulling the blankets up and rolling to face away from Fred. "Night."

"M'night," he mumbles back, the words mostly lost to the pillow he's got his face buried in. The light on the nightstand clicks off, dropping them both into sudden, total darkness.

He can finally get some sleep.

But Scooby Doo wakes them less than an hour later, launching himself from where he'd been sleeping at the foot of the bed to land hard on top of both of them, yelping and shaking and very clearly panicking about _something_.

"Scooby Doo, what's the matter with you?" Shaggy complains, trying to pull the blankets over his head to block out the unexpected awakening.

"A roast! A roast!" Their canine companion shouts, which, they've all learned, translates to 'ghost,' in Scooby talk. "Rover there!"

Fred, despite his exhaustion, lifts his head enough to look in the direction that Scooby is pointing. And finds... nothing. "There's nothing there, Scoob. Go back to sleep."

Even Shaggy seems too tired to be scared of whatever Scooby thought he saw, as Fred is sure he normally would be. "Yeah," he agrees, and burrows further down into the blankets. "No more ice cream before bed for you."

"Rawwww," Scooby pouts, but he seems appeased by their assurances and reclaims his space down by their feet, spinning in a circle three times before flopping down to rest.

Fred takes a moment to crawl under the blankets himself, and they prove to be more comfortable than he could have imagined. He's back to sleep in an instant, barely aware of Shaggy's soft snores beside him.

But, again, it is a only short-lived reprieve from his exhaustion.

This time he wakes to Shaggy shaking in his arms and his come up to keep Shaggy from falling on instinct. "What's wrong?" Fred manages, but his questions is followed by a terrified whimper from his bedmate when a loud 'screeeeeech' echoes through the room.

"W-what w-was that?" Shaggy asks him, eyes flicking around the room in search of an explanation for the noise. The screech comes again, coupled with an arrhythmic tapping sound that draws their attention to the window in the room, where the outline of an impressively creepy looking tree branch is barely visible in the pale moonlight. This does, however, explain both the sound (the tips of the branch scraping on the glass) and Scooby's earlier freak-out (as the shadow from the branch is where Scooby saw his not-a-ghost).

"Oh," Shaggy says, looking more than a little embarrassed at having freaked out over something so ridiculous, "Sorry, Freddy." However, when he extricates himself from Fred's arms, Fred registers that he doesn't shift all the way back to his side of the bed.

Scooby, likewise, has moved closer. But, he appears equally ashamed of his overreaction. "'Reah, rorry."

"S'okay," Fred assures them both, as his head once again settles on the pillow. "Go back to sleep, yeah?"

"Yeah," Shaggy agrees.

"R'okay."

This time there are no interruptions. The world finally seems content to let Fred, as well as Shaggy and Scooby, get some much needed rest.

* * *

The bright light of the morning sun is what finally draws Fred back to consciousness, though this time it is not quite as unwelcome as last night's not-so-scary awakenings had been. He yawns, and moves to stretch out in the space he should have on the bed, but he finds that he can't actually move at all.

Shaggy is lying half on top of him, head buried against his shoulder, with one arm tossed across Fred's chest. The fact that he has an arm curled around Shaggy's shoulders, keeping him pulled in close, suggests that he might have been complicit in this strange, new experience of sleep-cuddling with his best friend. Even Scooby's joined in, with his head propped up on the tangle of their legs.

It should be weird. It kind of is weird, he thinks, as he contemplates what he should do. But it's the best he's slept in a long time and the comfortable warmth that's surrounded him in the chilly room is nearly enough to lull him back to sleep despite the situation, and he opts to ignore the urge to escape from this before he has to come up with an explanation.

"Hey," Shaggy greets, and his voice thick and gravelly with sleep as he blinks over at Fred. "Morning."

"Morning," he echoes, and the feel of a wagging tail tells him that Scooby's awake, too.

He should let go, let Shaggy out of this before things get awkward because that is the last thing that he wants. Things finally stopped being awkward with the girls - after his and Daphne's break-up and Shaggy and Velma's failed attempt at a date.

"I, ugh," he starts, searching for an explanation that he doesn't have for why this arrangement went from roommates to bedmates to this. "This is, um..."

"Really comfortable?" Shaggy offers, making no move to escape, either.

Fred smiles and he can feel the tension sort of disappear between them. Shaggy shifts even closer to his side and he breathes a sigh of relief that the other boy isn't being weird about this like he was worried he might be. "Yeah. That," he agrees. "Definitely that."


End file.
